Some of the most contentious numbers in Puerto Rico's bankruptcy are population projections: How many taxpayers will be living on the island 10,20, or 50 years from now? Any attempt to gauge the commonwealth's fiscal prospects-and hence its ability to pay bondholders-depends in great measure on the reliability of those figures. Yet the consultant hired to calculate them has no demography degree, speaks little Spanish, and lives in Hong Kong.Last December, the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico took a chance on Lyman Stone, a U.S. Department of Agriculture economist with a personal interest in demographics. On a self-published blog called In a State of Migration, Stone has explored topics such as fertility in the Northern Mariana Islands and gentrifi-cation in Cincinnati. But it was his posts on Puerto Rico, a topic he took up in early 2016 at the suggestion of a Twitter follower, that got the most attention. "I got much more traffic than I was used to getting on my humble little blog," he says.
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